This Side of Wild Page 7

  The rabbit seemed doomed. While prairie jackrabbits are capable of amazing bursts of speed—up to and over fifty miles an hour—they are relatively short-winded. When worked the way this one was being worked—played in from the side—unless they could find some cover to dodge and jerk and hide in, or a safe haven, they were pretty much consigned to death. A cruel death.

  If you spend a lot of time with nature, you inevitably run into the concept, the reality of death. It comes to all living things. While now and then you hear somebody talking about how “. . . beautiful and elegant the predator-prey relationship is, how natural and proper the death of the prey is,” it is usually so much misunderstood balderdash by people who have not witnessed it very many times, or worse, by people who have witnessed only highly edited versions on film.

  In truth it is always cruel. It is often said that nature has no disdain, and therefore the natural death lacks the concept of anger, of revenge, of meanness, and that it is even sometimes—shudder—beautiful.

  Perhaps. But only in the way the stupid, bloody slaughter of a bull in a bullfight can be called beautiful. The truth is the bull is virtually maimed and tortured, hacked and cut and stabbed until it is near death and then ceremoniously stabbed with a sword. Conversely, most animals do not kill before they eat, and the prey is often eaten slowly, miserably, and alive—in great torture and pain.

  While initially as a hunter/trapper when a child, and also later, I had witnessed the concept and reality of death. As new knowledge it had now become something of less interest to me—especially after having worked on an ambulance for two years with the attendant horror and nightmares that go with that—and I no longer had that first blush of excitement or thought I had a need to know.

  I decided not to see this particular story play out—rabbits in particular make a soul-searing scream as they are eaten and die—and I started to turn the mare, had already turned my own head away when I noticed that the mare had not; she had, in fact, turned slightly to face the coyotes and rabbit. She was a strange and in some ways wonderful horse, capable of an odd interest in things and now and then great compassion. I watched her one day walking along, her nose down, studying a lizard in its meanderings, and once, when riding with a friend who had brought a very old deaf and blind little female dog for the ride, I saw the mare do something I would not have believed, nor would my friend, had we not both seen it. The little dog had always led the way and now, though severely handicapped, still walked in front, still led, or tried to as we moved up an old mining road/trail in the mountains near my home. The dog became slower and slower and the horses slower behind her until, finally, she stopped and stood, staring at the ground, lost.

  The mare hesitated and reached her head down, and I worried because there are some horses, many horses, who will not put up with dogs. I was concerned that the mare might bite or kick or stomp her. But no, I was wrong; instead she took the front of her nose, that big, soft, quivering, gentle nose, put it against the little dog’s rear end, and ever so gently nudge/pushed her along so she could stay ahead of us, stay as the leader. It was just the kindest, sweetest thing. . . .

  And now she had stopped, was watching the story unfold below us on the dry lake. I turned to watch with her and was surprised to see there had been a change.

  The jackrabbit had dodged, dug in, taken a hard right turn, which apparently surprised the coyotes enough to throw their pace off so that the rabbit maintained at least a small lead.

  Coming straight at us.

  The dynamic had changed completely. Where the jackrabbit had been running straight and flat on the surface of the lake with a coyote slightly to the rear on either side, the rabbit’s only hope was to outrun the coyotes in a straight run—a vain hope. But now he left the lake, crossed the ancient shoreline into more broken country—easier for him to navigate, slightly harder for the coyotes, and for a moment as he dodged and zipped back and forth, he actually gained slightly, the coyotes’ heavier bodies slowing them as they zigged and zagged, trying to catch him.

  Somehow I did not figure us—the horse and me—into the equation. In the past I’d had prey—in my case a snowshoe hare—come in and sit by me near a fire to avoid almost certain death by a weasel; and a wonderful old fisherman named Chris Tormundsen told me of a doe, a small deer, that ran out on the ice and jumped into his boat with him on Lake Superior to avoid being captured by a pack of wolves. And again, I had a small doe—almost a fawn, barely out of spots—jump into a canoe with me as I sat fishing near the shore of a small lake in Minnesota to avoid being caught by domestic dogs. Or nearly jump into the canoe. The effect was only a little short of biblical, with barking, gurgling, screaming dogs, swearing, gurgling, screaming fisherman, and a thrashing, tearing, panicking doe in a mess of rolling canoe, mud, and water. . . .

  This somehow seemed more detached, as if I were really not in the picture and only an observer.

  For the moment.

  Then, suddenly, everything was upon us. The rabbit zigged one last time around a scruffy boulder, ducked under an ancient century plant and stopped—dead—directly beneath the mare. Everything happened very fast, or I thought it would. The mare—Betty is her name (yet another Betty in my life)—always took a very dim view of quick surprises. I will remember forever some of what happened when a balloon that had caught under a bush jiggled loose and floated up into her nose out of nowhere. The balloon had a face painted on it, a grimacing face, a face, apparently, meant to scare the pee-wadden (I do not know what that means; it’s something my grandmother always said) out of horses, and I went from sitting in the saddle to sitting in an ocotillo cactus with no horse in sight and no knowledge about how it had happened.

  Heaven knew what would happen with a rabbit and two coyotes jammed in beneath her, and I had just about half a second to get ready for it when I realized I was mistaken. . . .

  Nothing happened.

  The rabbit made one last smoking effort and came to a dust-explosive shuddering stop directly beneath the mare. . . .

  Who stood, absolutely still, looking first down between her front legs back at the rabbit beneath her and the two coyotes, who were standing, panting deeply, about twenty yards away. They were scruffy-looking buggers—very much like the coyotes in cartoons—and clearly not happy with events. But they were both older and wiser coyotes and knew that even if I did not somehow intervene, coming under the mare to take the rabbit would be tantamount to committing suicide.

  So they held back.

  A time passed. Maybe thirty seconds.

  The mare took a slow, cautious step.

  The rabbit hopped forward, holding his pace to match that of the mare. The mare took another step, two, three, and the rabbit matched it, following along beneath her. I turned to see the two coyotes following, about thirty feet to the rear, slightly to either side.

  Oh, I thought, good. A parade.

  How long could it last? How long would the rabbit stay sheltered under her? How long would she put up with it—and why—before she exploded and dumped me in a pile of cactus? How long before the coyotes figured out a strategy to dislodge the rabbit? If two trains started from opposite ends of the track and one train was going forty miles an hour and the other twenty miles an hour, how long would it take . . . ?

  What, I thought, could I do to settle this thing? In the end I knew there was nothing and, in the end, it settled itself.

  A roadrunner chased a small lizard from the left side in front of our traveling animal cavalcade. The lizard hopped, the roadrunner leaped, flapped its wings, and flew, banking directly into and past the coyotes, who instinctively took after the bird, directly away from the rabbit, who took the opportunity to disappear into a thick stand of tangled, thorny mesquite. The mare twitched twice with her whole body, lunged left, then right, and tore off after the coyotes as if she had discovered a new kind of follow-the-leader. For a quarter, then half a mile, she fairly smoked after the coyotes until they ran out into the dry river/lak
e bed once again. There she stopped, breathing deeply, watching the coyotes disappear in the distance.

  I stood down and loosened the cinch and let her breathe all she could take in and thought once more of how often I seemed to control things from my supposed platform of being a human, and therefore a superior being. My life had for the last half hour been completely controlled by a horse, two coyotes, a roadrunner, and a jackrabbit. Not to mention the lizard. I was merely along for the ride—very precariously, as it turned out—which reminded me once again how really minor man can be when it comes to competing for space and time and food.

  Or water, as I would come to see when I witnessed the outbreak of interspecies war in a highway rest stop driving through Arizona.

  • • •

  I had purchased an old sailboat, which I wanted to use to explore the Pacific, and I kept this boat in Ventura, California. I lived then in a shack in the southern desert mountains of New Mexico, and the drive between the boat and the shack took almost exactly thirteen hours on Interstate 10. In the three years it took me to rebuild the boat, I seemed almost to live on that highway. All the rest areas in three states became as familiar as my home.

  At first it was not too crowded. Sometimes on the weekends there would be what might be called excessive traffic, but I confined my driving to the weekdays and it did not get thick until I was close to Southern California. But then air travel became more and more difficult and time-consuming due to enhanced security and driving grew much more attractive and comforting, and consequently, the highway quickly became a thronging hive of cars, trucks, vans, thousands (it seemed) of motorcycles, and huge families traveling together—especially approaching any holiday, like Easter or Christmas.

  As an adjunct to this increase in traffic, the population at the highway rest areas virtually exploded. It was common to find no parking spaces available and even more common to see crowds of people—scores, hundreds of them—stopping to rest, stretch, get a drink of water (more on this later), and (it seemed) let their children run wild.

  And this fact—children running amok—was perhaps the primary factor leading to the war.

  All the rest areas were built along isolated stretches of the highway—sensibly, since you want them where other facilities were not available. And it must be noted that the surrounding country where they were located was stark desert and not exactly crawling with wildlife.

  Still, what wilderness there was quickly came into contact—perhaps a better word would be “collision”—with the area itself and the people who were stopping there.

  First, the birds.

  I had spent almost my entire life misjudging birds. For some reason I thought them stupid and then found initially from parrots, mynah birds, crows, and ravens that they are indeed not only not ignorant and stupid but in many cases smarter than people. Still later I found that even the smallest birds—sparrows, wrens, chickadees—had wonderful innate intelligence, could work complicated math problems, and live—actually make a living and a family and live—in weather and conditions that would drop a human dead in his tracks.

  It was in fact in the rest areas in the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico that I first saw the smaller birds make use of this intellect. It was as a child in the Philippine Islands that I saw larger birds make use of thinking ability. In 1946 we lived in a camp outside of Manila, which came in constant contact with belligerent soldiers called “Huks.” They would attack the fences at night and were driven off with machine-gun fire. This fire was often deadly accurate and resulted in casualties among the attackers—so often that it was quite usual in the mornings to see their bodies along the wire. Many of these attackers carried rations—most often rice balls. There were wild chickens almost everywhere—literally thousands of them—and they soon came to learn that machine-gun fire resulted in a chance to get at the rations or other food, and they would come running if they heard automatic weapons firing, trying to find the rice balls among the bodies of the casualties. I was walking down a gravel road one day past a machine-gun post when they fired a short burst in the air to check out some part of their weapon—machine-gun fire was very common—and I was surprised to see dozens of chickens come running out of the brushy jungle as if attacking the machine-gun position—clearly disappointed when there were no bodies to check.

  Similarly, the small birds in the rest areas began to learn that the automobiles and trucks that came roaring in brought with them a wonderful smorgasbord of insects caught and carried in their radiator grilles. Especially as spring came and the insects began their chains of reproduction; radiators became literally packed with insects, and birds flocked to the moving harvest. At first there was some confusion and open bickering; while the truck grilles were spread and open and bigger birds could get at them, many of the smaller, compact cars were limited and only small birds could get inside. Still, in the beginning the bigger birds would try the smaller cars, get trapped, and raise holy Hannah trying to get out before the tourists drove off with them trapped inside.

  They seemed to learn fast, however, and soon—within days and even hours, in some cases—small birds were hitting small cars and larger birds were hitting the trucks and larger vehicles. It seemed, however, to go almost too smoothly, and I spent more time at one of the busier rest areas and learned after lengthy study that the choreography was being controlled by some of the larger birds. These birds were scraggly-looking black birds—we used to call them “grackles.” They were just a bit smaller than crows, moving in migration in large, sometimes huge, flocks. They were individually very pushy, almost cocky or snappy birds, seemingly quick to anger and push others around, much as the behavior they would use to keep someone from messing with their nest. They would rush and peck at both small and large birds who were feeding in the wrong size vehicle and, furthermore, they policed each vehicle to make certain the birds “assigned” to their radiator did a good job of cleaning out the bug carcasses.

  Or so it looked. In any event, I was stunned at what I was watching; the organization, the conceptualization, the pure order of what I was seeing floored me, and then it changed again, grew. The grackles seemed to study what they had done and decided there was another ingredient, or perhaps a further dynamic that threatened to upset the order.

  The people.

  In the rapid movement and shuffle of birds and vehicles and radiator grilles, the tourists did not seem to recognize their positional importance in the flow of order. To wit: If they came back to their cars or trucks too soon, the birds at that particular radiator would miss out on some amount of food.

  It was too clearly a waste, and the grackles set out at once to remedy the situation. If they saw somebody heading for their car before they thought it was time, they would use the “defend the nest” procedure—diving and fluttering their wings and pecking at the person’s hair—to alarm them and push them back from their cars.

  It was not 100 percent effective, but it started a kind of discomfort or panicked reaction, and people in general—there were about thirty people at that time in the rest area, with ten or fifteen arriving and departing—began moving in back-and-forth directions without quite knowing why they did so.

  At this moment the bees entered the picture, taking over the water and finishing the job of conquering the rest area.

  Obviously, it was not a planned operation—how could it be?—but the effect was the same. The water inside the bathrooms was not potable and was separate and sealed in the rooms by tight doors. This threw the only supply of drinking water on a small drinking fountain about twenty feet from the bathroom doors, and the heavy use of this fountain and perhaps lack of maintenance had caused it to leak with a steady trickle so that there was water there all the time and not just when the button was pushed.

  This was on a very hot day in the middle of the Arizona desert.

  Water was so valuable to all living things as to be virtually incalculable, and a colony of bees (I think killer bees, based on their aggress
iveness, but I wasn’t sure how to tell) discovered the steady stream of fresh, cool water about the same time as a troop of traveling schoolchildren from two vans with some kind of church group.

  The children were thirsty and crowded around the fountain.

  The bees were thirsty and decided to defend the same fountain.

  The grackles became furious because traffic to and from the vehicles wasn’t moving right, and so they lined up to begin dive-bombing just about everybody.

  There was a moment, just a moment, like the hesitation in a cheap Western movie just before the gunfight starts.

  Then it broke loose.

  A bee, or perhaps two or three, hit a child or perhaps two or three.

  Somebody screamed.

  I got in my car.

  And everybody ran everywhere, yelling and screaming as the bees continued their attack, and the grackles—joined by other birds—kept trying to herd them. Some got into the wrong vehicles—any port in a storm—some ran for the toilets (irrespective of gender), quite a few of them just ran (I swear I saw a trucker making close to twenty miles an hour in rubber flip-flops heading out for the freeway), and not a few loped off into the desert, where they discovered cactus, assorted thorns, and heaven knows how many different kinds of stinging bugs and reptiles.

  It was, all in all, a grand example of interspecies lack of cooperation and the further illustration that might makes right. I stayed in the rest area, in my car, for another half an hour, until everything had settled down, and saw who emerged as the victor.

  The bees kept the water fountain.